Mark Zuckerberg And An Army Of Insurgent Entrepreneurs Just Declared War On The TV, Music, News, And Movie Industries

At the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco last week, Facebook
CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave a six minute speech about how, starting
sometime in the next five years, he expects his company to make
billions and billions of dollars turning the TV, news, film, and
music industries upside down.

The speech was nuanced and obviously pre-planned. It contained
big revelations. But because it came in the middle of a
wide-ranging, hour-long interview, hardly anybody noticed.

The gist: As has already happened in the gaming industry – where
Zynga now has a larger market cap than Electronic Arts – Facebook
expects insurgent entrepreneurs to "reform" the film, TV, news,
e-commerce and music industries with the help of Facebook. Some
of these companies will be incumbents. Some will unseat
incumbents. Facebook will then – perhaps through credits or
advertising, but also perhaps some other way – tax these
companies in exchange for the value it has added.

Here's how Zuckerberg put it:

"Anything that involves content or specific expertise in an area
– games, music, movies, TV, news, anything in media, anything
e-commerce, any of this stuff.

Over the next five years, those verticals are going to be
completely re-thought. There are going to be some really good
businesses built.

Our view is that we should play a role in helping to re-form and
re-think all those industries, and we'll get value proportional
to what we put in. In gaming, we get some percentage of the value
of those companies through ads and credits. But that's all
because we're helping them.

If we're helpful to other industries in building out what would
be a good solution then there will be some way we get value from
that. "

In the next few days, we're going to publish a speculative story
on how Facebook can "reform" those industries the way it has been
able to funnel hundreds of millions of users into social gaming.
We'll be talking about some of these issues at our Ignition
conference next week too. We'd love to hear your thoughts,
too. Comment below or email us at Nicholas@businessinsider.com.